Seeking examples of very small coaling towers

[mmagliaro]

I have a model of a small coaling tower on my layout (photo below).

I built this from plans in an RMC article, and that same set of plans was turned into a JV Models kit at some point (you can still find those craftsman kits on eBay for this tower).  The article says it is a 40 ton coaling tower based on a 1923 CB&Q prototype.  However, it doesn't give any more information than that.  And in fact, I cannot find any coaling tower this "diminuitive" either in my books or on the internet (except for photos of this same model plan from RMC or JV Models).

How common was a coaling tower this small?  How come I cannot find any others?  Was this a crackpot one-off thing, or were they common, but tended to be in small rural areas where they were rapidly torn down at the end of steam and did not survive to be photographed?

In my case, it lives on a small 1-track siding that provides coal for small pusher engines at the base of a hill.  I justify that the number of trains per day is low, the pusher is a small switcher, and so it would make sense to only need a small tower like this.   In actual fact, I just like the structure, I built it almost 30 years ago, and I wanted an excuse to keep using it.   But I want to know if my "made up prototyping" makes sense.  It would be nicer to see some actual prototype scenes with towers this small.

[mmagliaro]

And in a related question, this little tower was filled with a bucket hoist inside the tower on the back side (bottom of it is visible through the tower legs on the bottom, at the rear).  Even allowing that the bucket holds about 1/2 cubic yard, my calculations tell me it would take 103 bucket loads to fill a 40 ton tower.  Even worse, I have read that in the "old days" these towers had a manually operated hoist. 

So did one or two guys actually stand there hoisting 780 lb buckets of coal up and into the tower, over and over, to fill the tower?  Even allowing for some sort of pulley reduction system so they could lift the weight, it seems like it would take days to hoist that many bucket loads up and into the tower! 

Even with a motor-driven hoist, it seems like it would take all day to do 100 bucket loads.

[Chris333]

Here is the real Soo Line tower:
https://www.american-rails.com/images/Soo_RK_CoalTower.jpg
Marquette, Michigan on a cold and snowy November day in 1976.

Oops though it was yours:
http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/paulD/2007101421521_coaling%20tower-a_02.jpg

Very similar.

[Chris333]

[Chris333]

There is a narrow gauge tower in Chama:
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1280&bih=625&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=93jbW-i8DITosAXPk5rYCQ&q=Charma%20coaling%20tower%20-site%3Apinterest.*&oq=Charma%20coaling%20tower%20-site%3Apinterest.*&gs_l=img.3...244536.246772..247151...1.0..0.139.607.6j1......1....1..gws-wiz-img.tf7HlD20lmY

[mmagliaro]

Chris,
Thanks.  I did find that Soo tower, but couldn't find any info on it.  Your reference specifically says it was a 20-25 ton capacity, so it was even SMALLER than mine?

Can you point me to how you found that on Railroad Line forum?  I'm a member there, so I can search and look at the whole article, but I can't find it.

[Chris333]

I just searched "small coaling tower". Once I found the drawings I searched "Soo Line coaling tower".

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18276

https://www.american-rails.com/coaling.html

[Maletrain]

Since you are looking for justification of realism, I looked at tender capacities of a passel of older B&O locomotives for which I have specs.  The minimum capacities of the old "camelback" days were around 10-11 tons of coal.  More modern 2-8-0s were around 15-18 tons.  The 2-8-2s were around 16-18 tons.  The really big stuff  (huge 2-10-2s and 2-8-8-4s) held 20-25 tons.  A standard 2-bay hopper held 50-55 tons. 

So, you can compute the number of times you need to provide a full hopper to reload the tower on the basis of how many times you load a tender of a particular capacity.

The real question is how fast do your particular locomotives burn that coal in the service you are using them for.  A google search yielded this
"The average fuel consumption of road locomotives on our system, during the year 1952, was 93.9 pounds per 1000 gross ton miles—the lowest figure on record," for large, modern (1952) steam locomotives. ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00966665.1954.10467614 ).  Trying to equate that to a model railroad is pretty subjective, given the "compression" of distance and time that we often use on our layouts.  But, if you have some engineering sense, use it to make the number of coaling stops seem realistic to you.  Remember Rule #1: It is your railroad.

[mmagliaro]

I just searched "small coaling tower". Once I found the drawings I searched "Soo Line coaling tower".

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18276

https://www.american-rails.com/coaling.html

Thanks.  Found it!  Unfortunately, that thread only has the one page.  There is a May 1988 article with the whole story plus all drawings, so I suppose I could dig that up. Thank you again.

Any idea about the arduous task of filling that hoist bucket over and over to lift all that coal up into the tower?  How long did it take them to do this?

[Chris333]

If you can't find it let me know. I searched for the cover and I should have it.

[mmagliaro]

Chris,
That video of the model actually operating is actually quite useful.  It takes 35 seconds to hoist one bucket of coal up in dump it into the bin, and bring it back down.  Even if it takes another 35 to load the bucket through a conveyor from the hopper car, that would be 70 seconds * 103 loads = 120 minutes.  So it would take a few hours, but I do see now how they could do this.   (I mean, of COURSE they did this!   But it was hard to visualize such a manual system really working fast enough).

Maletrain:
A 10 ton coal capacity on a small steam switcher seems reasonable.  Estimating coal consumption by tons per mile wouldn't really help for a helper station, though, because the engine won't actually run very many miles at all.  Just up and down a hill, say, 10 times per day.  Most of the time, the coal will be consumed just keeping the engine warmed up and ready to go.  Still 93.9 lbs for 1000 ton miles... Let's say it's a 1/2 mile up the hill, and it's shoving a train of 20 loaded 40 ft freight cars (80,000 lbs each, so 40 tons).  That's 800 tons x 1/2 = 400 ton miles.  Since it's only a "helper" we can assume the lead engine does at least 1/2 the work, but then again, this is uphill, so the consumption will be much higher than the average.  Leaving it at 400 ton miles per trip, that's 400/1000 x 93.9 = about 38 lbs of coal.   10 trips/day = 380 lbs.  One 40-ton towerfull would last 210 days.  Okay, let's make it 100 to allow for engine startup in the morning and keeping it hot all day.

All the way around, I guess it does seem completely practical that a small tower like this could do the job.

[Maletrain]

I really have no idea how men managed to lift coal into the tower that is the prototype for your model.  There are plenty of examples of men filling small tenders with shovels from tender-top stages in the early days.  Some short lines used steam shovel buckets to fill tenders up to the end of steam. 

But, if I was using your model and needed to pretend that the 40 tons was turning over in the tower very fast, I would make the assumption that it was filled by a mechanized system running the lift buckets.  I am pretty sure that, by the turn of the century, a real short line would have found some way to make a machine turn a crank, even if that crank was initially turned by hand when the tower was first built.  If that doesn't look possible for the model you have, maybe add a small shed for an electric motor, or a "donkey" steam engine?

[Chris333]

Remember before hopper cars they even had to un-load those by hand.

There could be air or steam power to lift the bucket, but yeah just dumping the coal and loading the buckets would be hard work.

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Would they be able to siphon steam from a waiting engine to run a pump system?

[nkalanaga]

They probably wouldn't try, once engines had air brakes.  I've seen turntables powered by air motors, where they connected the engine air hose to a hose on the table.  The same thing would work for powering a hoist, and would be much simpler than trying to run a steam line.